


blunt, blade, bludgeon, blow

by arbitrarily



Category: Sharp Objects (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-03 14:24:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15820698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Camille, after.





	blunt, blade, bludgeon, blow

**Author's Note:**

> While I have read the book, this relies on the TV canon, in particular, that ending. Any warnings for the show likewise apply here.

 

 

I will unravel when no one sees what I see.  
WAXAHATCHEE

 

 

 

Her hand sweats around the doorknob. Her grip doesn’t lessen. The door shakes in its frame. She didn’t know what else to do. She doesn’t know what else to do. “You can’t do this to me!” Amma is shrieking, pounding. Fists, skull. Camille waits for the sirens. They’ll break down the front door. She waits for that, too. She waits and she waits. Her grip holds. 

 

 

 

Amma, pupils black. Amma, mouth pink and breath hot and she whispers. Real, not real. A crown of flowers, skinned knees, roller-skates on Mama’s good floor. Not real. She drags the flat of her hand down the stretch of wallpaper in the foyer. 

“SILK,” Amma’s saying.

“WEB,” she says. 

She holds a finger up to her mouth. “Shh,” she says. 

SCREAM.

 

 

 

They give Camille a paper cup of lukewarm tea down at the station. They leave her in an interrogation room for an hour. When the door opens, it’s Richard and Vickery on the other side. A St. Louis detective with a fat neck and an ugly tie follows them in to the table. WOODS, KNEES, BEND. Of them, only Vickery looks her in the eye so she looks back. 

“When’d you know?” It’s the first thing Richard says to her.

“About Amma?” She can barely hear herself.

“When did you know?”

WARM WET PAPER THIN BABY GUTS

“Now,” Camille says. "I know now.”

“When.” He says it again but he forgets the inflection needed at the end of a sentence to make it a question. He may not be a good detective. She may not be a good journalist. Amma, under her roof. Under Adora’s. The dollhouse roof was heavier than Camille thought it would be. She lifted it, and —

“That’s enough, K.C.,” Vickery says. It's not gratitude Camille feels but embarrassment. Richard is looking at her now, accusatory. Like he didn’t know horror until he met her. Her family. He’s not a good detective.

They ask her more questions, and she answers. Before they leave, before they let her leave, Vickery places his hand over hers, skin hot to the touch, and he nods. “I’m real sorry, Camille.” She yanks her hand away.

 

 

 

She returns home, hours later. The scene of the crime. She fingers the broken deadbolt on her front door, the splintered wood. She lays down on the floor in the middle of her apartment, the faux wood cool under her heated cheek. Her breath won’t come right, tension pulled too tight, manic energy galloping through her. Nausea. Fear. The cops had pulled her place apart. From the floor, she can see her books are spilled from the shelves, scattered under the couch. Amma’s room is cordoned off with yellow police tape. CAUTION. WARNING. TEETH. Camille’s skin pulls too tight. Aching, needing. Teeth, but no blood. Camille needs the blood, her own, that initial sting, then that hot release as it starts to drip. GUSH, COAGULATE, SCAB. She’s panicking. She scratches her fingernails over the back of her neck, faster, deeper, not enough. Deeper, deeper, harder, she needs —

There’s a knock at the door. 

 

 

 

Symptoms of ethylene glycol poisoning include: intoxication, dizziness, lack of muscle coordination, drooling, slurred speech, headaches, confusion, abdominal pain, vomiting, excessive thirst and urination. Untreated, as the body metabolizes ethylene glycol into the system, seizures, kidney failure, and brain damage will result. 

When using antifreeze products containing ethylene glycol, proper precautions and safety measures are recommended. 

 

 

 

“You gonna stay here tonight?” It’s Richard. Her front door no longer locks. 

“I live here,” she says. 

“This is our home,” Amma had said. SOFT. CODDLE. BITE. One week in, a pot of pasta boiling on the stove, red pasta sauce smeared on the side of her hand.

Camille lets him fuck her again. Not in her bed, but the same spot on the floor she fell to when she came home. Hard wood under her, in her. She lets him see her naked. He already has before; why the fuck not now. Amma rollerskating into the dark of the lawn, spinning, falling. You let people do things to you and it’s like you’re doing it to yourself. Was that what she said? Poisoned blood; GASH SLICK CUNT. Doing it to them. It’s easier to keep yourself hidden when you keep your legs spread. Richard barely looks at her body and the words carved into it. He doesn’t ask her what she did to herself. That surprises her. She thought he’d be the sort to draw a hand over her body, raised scar tissue scraping under his palm, and ask, “Baby, what’d you do to yourself?” Baby what did you do. 

 

 

 

She let the boy kiss her body in that motel room. INNOCENT. Sheets musty and stiff under her, John unyielding and giving SHARE HEAT BORROWED PAGE around, above, inside her. She hadn’t lied; he was beautiful. He held her like he knew loss same as she did, so she clung back. Shoulders, hips, his hair too short to grab. He read to Camille her own body; he made each word new and hers.

 

 

 

Camille returns, the scene of the crime. She goes back to Wind Gap. Alan is selling the house. Amma’s trial looms like a threat, a natural disaster. 

She drives, her grip tight on the steering wheel. She holds her breath, superstitious, a child racing past a cemetery, cautious of ghosts. Courts them all the same. She pulls into Jackie’s drive. She pulls the key from the ignition and she sits real still for awhile, the heat pressing in. She doesn’t know why she’s here. She gets out of the car.

Jackie is the one to tell her. “They’re saying that Keene boy, gone ahead and took off.” She takes a long slurp of her drink, sighs as she swallows. Jackie dresses better now. Skirt suits that imply a more important life than the one she leads. Still drinks like a fish, but if Camille knows anything, she knows this: there ain’t no fighting that. “Chicago,” she whispers, like a dirty word.

“That right?” Camille says. 

She’s reminded of a past conversation with Jackie, the same dulled light in her eyes, mouth mean and bittersweet. PEARL. CATCH. GRAVE. “Boys play games. Girls learn how to cheat,” she said. Like it was the greatest wisdom a woman like her could impart to a girl like Camille. Like that was all she had to teach her. She was thirteen.  Like the good book said or didn’t say, there endeth the fucking lesson. 

 

 

 

Camille slips into old habits. After Jackie’s, the bar. A double Maker’s. She throws that down fast, orders another. Across the bar, she spots Vickery. Sun hasn’t set yet but he’s in civilian clothes, curled over the table and his drink like he’s got something to disguise. She waits until he lights a cigarette before she approaches him. Sits down across from him without a word. GAG TURN INK. He's silent too, just lifts his cigarette and his chin, until he finally does say, “The Preaker girl.”

“You got another one of those?” she asks. Points to the pack, the lighter, beside his beer.

“I do,” he says. He pushes them across the table to her. 

Her first inhale is a long drag that makes her lungs tighten; it’s good. She exhales just as purposeful, slow, wills her mind to a blank nothing. 

“You knew what Adora was doing,” she hears herself say.

“No, Miss Preaker." He sighs like he knew this was coming. "I did not know.”

“You knew what Mama was doing to us.” She says it barely above a whisper. He looks like he wants to hit her. Just as fast, his face rearranges itself, sad instead of angry, tired. Like there’s no energy left in him for the rage that still churns inside of her. 

“She used to talk about you, sometimes. Talked like you were dangerous. I can see why now.”

“You call me dangerous,” she says, the rest unsaid.

“A trapped animal fighting to survive is always the most dangerous animal, Miss Preaker.”

PIG PORCELAIN CRUSH CAGE

“You visit her?”

“No,” he says. “You?”

She shakes her head. 

“I thought not,” he says. He settles back into his chair. “What you come back here for?”

“Alan’s selling the house. Which I’m sure you already know. I wanted,” and she stops. She doesn’t need to defend herself. She came back to the house. She went in Marian’s room and she touched each surface, as if for luck. Not luck, remembrance. She wants to know everything, store it inside herself, almost as much as she wants to forget. The dresses in the closet. CLASP. The pages they ripped from magazines and kept like secrets in the nightstand’s bottom drawer. WORRY. The lip of the tub. BREATHE. The windowsill. Camille touched it all. 

“Sure. You still at that paper?”

“Yeah. I took a leave, but.” She can’t complete her sentences; trapped animal. “I got a couple book deals, offers, I’m floating.”

“Would you look at that.”

Camille isn’t really considering them. Doesn’t know how to put everything down again. Take the words from her body and write them again by hand. How to make sense of it. How to tell it like a story instead of something she wants to scream and smother. She’s floating. 

A Mary Margaret O’Hara song is playing. Camille closes her eyes as she swallows. Opens them. 

“You loved her,” she says to him.

Vickery lifts his eyes to her. Small shake of his head. Rueful. RED. “You don’t love Adora. You of all people should know that.” STOP. A pause as he finishes his drink. “You worship her.” SNARL. “You’re like her, you know.”

“Fuck off.” She grounds her cigarette out in the ashtray. That tide of rage is cresting within her. BROKEN IMPOTENT JAGGED SWALLOW.

“More than you think. More than you want.”

She clenches her jaw, looks at him. It’d be so easy. She can picture it. Out back. In her car. In that same motel room where he found her. TONGUE PUSH LOCK DOOR. It’d be the closest thing for him to get what he thought he wanted. She could show him how wrong he was. Make it hurt, not sure if she means for him or for her. Push him down. Make him push her down. SQUEEZE. SHAKE. COCK. CRY. COME. 

“She didn’t love you either.” She says it flat, nastiness built into each word, her voice.

“What a thing to share in common.” He’s resigned. She wonders if he’ll resign. He won’t. Men don’t walk away from Wind Gap; pigs in shit. 

The whiskey settles in her along with something worse. “This is a bad place,” she says quietly. 

She can picture it: Vickery’s belt buckle clangs as he reaches to unfasten it. 

“Yeah? Well you ain’t gotta come back here again, now do you.”

 

 

 

“My beautiful girl has gone and ruined her beautiful body.”

Camille does not visit Adora. She is with her enough already.

“I don’t know why you do these things to yourself,” Adora said.

SPOON. BOTTLE. SPIDER. DRIVE.

“Here, baby. Let Mama help,” she said.

FEED. FEED. FEED.

 

 

 

The primary benefit for the use of an anticoagulant is that the time it takes for the poison to kill means the rats do not associate the damage done with their feeding habits. They will continue to ingest the poison. 

In the final phase of intoxication, the rat collapses, exhausted, from hemorrhagic shock or severe anemia. The rat is said to die calmly. 

 

 

 

This is what Camille knows: stories of women who walk to meet their death. Virginia Woolf, into the river. Joan of Arc, the pyre. Ethel Rosenberg, the chair. Plath, the oven.

Camille walks into the juvenile detention center outside of St. Louis city limits. She writes her name on the sign-in sheet. The pen slips in her sweaty grip. Amma. They keep her isolated. They gave her a cellmate, at first. Amma had called Camille CURDLE NAIL GRASS FALL and said to her, goading, “I want you to tell me what yours drank.”

SPLATTER

“Who drank what, Amma?”

BED

“Your cellmate.”

SHRIEK. SONG. 

Camille recommended solitary to her doctor, the warden, anyone who would listen. “I’m begging you,” she said. LATE. “She’s dangerous.” She knows now. So do they.

 

 

 

Stories of women who walk to meet the dead; this is what she knows.

Outside the sun is shining, the humidity thick, a clammy hand around the throat. She has dinner with the Currys BUTTER, STIR, HOLD later that evening. She has bones flesh heart. Her skin says: I will tell you the story of a woman who walked to meet the dead.

The visitation room is crowded with mothers. BOUND. Camille takes a seat. CLEAN.

I will tell you, then she came back.

AFTER.

Across from her, Amma presses her lips to the dirty plexiglass. “Sister. I’ve been waiting.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Here's [the Mary Margaret O'Hara song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXNuKLROxa0) referenced in the bar scene.


End file.
